Before kicking off my annual Bomber Task Force night time fencewalk for 2024, I headed down to Brize Norton to catch the RCAF CC-330 Husky in the Canadian colours. This is an aircraft that has visited BZZ fairly frequently over the past few months, but often during dark hours or when I have been unable to visit.

The weather seemed to be a bit hit or miss after arriving at Station Road, then in rolled the dark clouds. The Husky was meant to be due in at 1800, but thankfully was delayed until 1930 giving the clouds enough time to shift. In the meantime, we were treated to ZZ336 landing albeit in suboptimal lighting.

Nearing 1930, the clouds started to shift revealing the gorgeous golden hour sun. In came the Husky, with the light shining on its starboard side - not an angle of sunlight often achievable at BZZ.

Afterwards, I headed to Bombertown to kick off my annual fencewalk, which yielded some fantastic results with the B-1s in 2023. Fortunately, I had a fair while to wait before darkness which gave me ample opportunity to photograph the Knighthawks basking in the final light.

It's not often a shot presents itself as well as it did here, with the vivid orange sun directly behind the subject leaving a silhouette of the airframe. This is a similar shot to one that I took at Mildenhall in Easter 23 with WM of a KC-135 ready to taxi out. The camera captured the vividness perfectly, with very little editing needing to be done to reflect the atmosphere of the evening.

After fencewalk round 1 was complete to get the sunset shots, I waited until the U-2 returned. I walked round to Dunsfield crash gate to catch the Dragon Lady taxi past. At 2200, lighting was non-existent, but the experience was thrilling as usual at this location, having the worlds greatest aircraft taxi within just a few metres.

I returned back to my original space by the Buffs now that the sun had set and the light was no more. I tried with the tripod but found I could not position the lens close enough to the fence to not get the chicken wire in the edges of the frame. Handheld shots it was.

Having recently bought the Sigma dock for my lens, I had set one of the custom buttons to the more aggressive stabilisation setting for just this moment. Thankfully, I was able to get nice and sharp images as low as 1/5s.

I found that the flood lights were not laying light down as nicely as they were on the Bones in 23. Perhaps this is due to them being much larger, and having large wings which shadow some of the light from the fuselage.

Here are my results :)

The orange fluorescent light gave a nice glow...